My friend Ethan was bragging about his speakers. “It sounds like he’s right there in the room with you,” he said, putting some obscure country blues on the turntable at a modest volume and letting the spirit fill the room. It did, wholly. I was, typically, unimpressed. Ethan’s obsession with the authorial aura was nicely undressed in Peter Doyle’s Echo and Reverb, a fantastic book on the production of “authentic” sonic space that reproduces human intimacy in the essentially laboratory-like conditions of the studio. More impressive to me was the sound described in Tim Lawrence’s necessary history of the early New York disco scene, Love Saves The Day. He writes of big-eared disco innovators pushing cabinets around lofts trying to get perfect balance, then building their own, or having them built to suit their aural fantasies for a new kind of playback: loudspeakers not meant for bands, but for records, for big space not meant to reproduce the frontal spread of a rock gig but hereto unimaginable stereoscopic totality. No longer just for novelty, exotica, or experimental albums—disco was the new mix. What’s fascinating about the entire genre and lifestyle most associated with hedonistic sex is that it was built from the work of total audiophile geeks, such as David Mancuso, on an endless gear-quest. (More argument that the ear is the most undervalued, most public erogenous zone.)

Disco was slow funk, recordings of live bands, and strings mixed to perfection. The move to house was, in part, technological. Replace the musicians with machines and you get a whole new circuit, one where the human touch is untraceable—no small thanks to Kraftwerk for the idea, and Italo producers for the bridge, which Europeans crossed more readily, as well as Devo for the U.S.-style man-machine interpretation. Pop has always had its post-humanist urge, but with these innovators and a shift into the information age, the sound and sentiment of digital production merged and found expression in everyday life through pop.

The ‘80s were a decade of absolute innovation of pop’s space, and perhaps nothing aided the change in space more than the digital keyboard. Talk about making limitations into strengths. The most common adjective for digital audio technology of the ‘80s is “primitive” for a reason: the timbre, attack, sustain, release, and decay of synthesizer instruments was so totally unrealistic as to make mimesis of acoustic instruments impossible, or laughable. Unlike the analog timbre and reverb, it was just pure synthesis with sines, saws, and squares. Math made aural. Try to make “piano” and fail. Try to make “alien”—an essentially fantastic, unknowable sound—and it sounds great. To this dry sound add equally digitized reverb and suddenly all rooms of all fabrics and all sizes from wet halls to glass cathedrals can be simulated around the sound event. There are infinite places the ear could head—no longer just a jazz basement, sweaty club, or stadium—while parked comfortably at home.
Synth-pop envisioned a music beyond domestic or religious architecture. Weirdoes, non-musicians, and artists, pushing the artifice and innovation, imagined sounds of rooms they’d want to be in. Praise be the utterly artificial and its new sci-fi priests, the synth-pop duo, a perfectly modern reduction of musical labor: one engineer and one singer, the embodiments of science and expression. They made a genre of hyper-kitsch pop structures and presets and in the time left over crafted performances that mimicked the cold closeness of no-decay stabs or the eerie cloud of endless, sustaining pads. On stage, in studio, the creatures they became—aliens, the robots, future people (which is, incidentally, what will.i.am calls himself)—were inherently queer in that they inhabited space in unnatural, purposefully provocative ways and in unrecognizable sound territories. Remember new wave dancing—the hooks of air keyboard can be played anywhere, the pitches popping like notes in Fantasia. And, like the robot boy David in AI (2001), the synthetic space of this new world could be a place of longing and loneliness (queue that tear of petrol, Pinnochio), as forsaken as the mountain nymph Echo.

Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Yaz, and Wham! (or latter day folks like Fischerspooner and Daft Punk) don’t need me to sell their merits—they are as crass as could be—where Fad Gadget, The Normal, and so many others languished in the art school, indie-label ghetto with their more avant song styles or purposefully abject lyrics. But then there’s Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, the synth-pop boys who kept (most of) the depravity, the queer space, and unknowable synths, and still made themselves into pin-ups for all kinds of girls and boys. These are synth-pop’s heroes, the folks who showed space is the place to make new rooms of pleasure out of the cold circuits of new tech. So what if the rooms came to look like Hot Topic. Where else in middle America do you find pride pins, albums, and unisex makeup?
I took Ethan to see Fischerspooner’s “Entertainment” tour in 2009, and he was blown away. The room vibrated with headdresses, on-stage costume racks filled with outlandish couture, gorgeous modern dancers and, best of all, the master-of-ceremonies Casey Spooner: a pudgy, changling diva shouting out to his decade-long fans before beckoning at Madonna in the VIP, hitting his queues in an ungraceful but confident way, always lip-synched to his cohort Warren Fischer’s delightfully untasteful minimal electro. “This,” I turned to tell Ethan, “is what I want to enter into my room when I turn the stereo on.”